The poem first came to my attention last spring, on a day when I was home tending to my oldest son, Nikolai, home from school with a cold. At one point in the afternoon, he claimed he was bored and, quite shockingly, asked me for something to do. I was looking through some volumes of BAP at the time, so I asked him to look through one of them and choose a poem to memorize. (I wonder if admitting such a thing make me seem unimaginative, über nerdy, heartless, or all three?) Picking up the 2005 volume, he initially chose James Cummins’s “The Poets March on Washington,” undoubtedly because it is short and consists of three repetitions of the same stanza. Though Cummins’s poem is obviously purposefully repetitious and it ultimately succeeds at what it sets out to do, I was hoping Nikolai would choose something with a bit more meat to it, so I challenged him to find another. He soon alighted upon Ryan’s “Roost,” and, after about 45 minutes of trial-and-error memorization, complaining, and recitation tweaks, he knew the poem cold. Here he is only a few weeks ago, at Jennings Beach in Fairfield, having only minimally reviewed a copy of the poem beforehand:

Interestingly, one of my neighbor’s in Fairfield has converted the vast plot of land behind his house into a suburban sanctuary for geese and various other fowls. Though it does not happen every day, I do sometimes rise to the sound of a rooster’s morning song. Here is a mostly obstructed view of my neighbor’s backyard “compound” from my back deck.

I don’t expect the viewer will be able to see the tool sheds, the beehives, all of the bird shelters, and the man-made pond, but in the left of the middle ground, I have captured the enclosure that houses baby ducks, a rooster, and several exotic chickens.

So in this way, Nikolai’s choice of “Roost” was an inspired one, since, in a sense, we live next door to a small group of experts when it comes to roosting.

Ryan provides us with an exceptionally literal—albeit immense—representation of those “dire consequences,” since in the world of her poem, the sky is filled with returning chickens, so many that they are blotting out the sun. (An image that requires a bit of a leap from readers, as it not a common occurrence to see these winged creatures high in the sky.) The speaker of the poem attributes this return of the chickens to “you”—we readers—who had, at some point in the past, “let loose” a group of young chickens “one at a time.” Now “we” find ourselves overwhelmed with the consequence of our act, as the chickens are back, darkening the sky, and doing this “at the same speed.”

In her contributor’s notes, Ryan invites us to see the events of September 11, 2001, as an example of the proverb writ large, and it is certainly possible to pull this thread out of the poem, as the returning threat in the sky, “circling” with “speed,” is suggestive of the airliners that were used with such deadly force on that infamous morning. (If we wish to take the reading a step further, the shape of the poem itself resembles a skyscraper.) If we continue with this interpretive stance, the only implication available to us is a matter of geopolitics, as the poem serves to remind us that it was our nation’s approach to the Middle East, whether governmental or military or cultural, that was the root cause of the attacks.

And yet, as I sit and compose this response on September 11, exactly 15 years to the day of those unforgettable events, I am not finding myself drawn to this reading of the poem. Instead, I am more interested in the sly way in which Ryan conceals the poem’s rhyme scheme, inviting us to see that the poem, even as it describes a present threat in response to our past deeds, relies on tradition as perhaps the best means for our defense.